BILLY BATHGATE
With Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, Loren Dean, Steven Hill, and Bruce Willis.
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Billy Bathgate, Benton’s latest film, isn’t a project he originated. But he was under contract at Disney, and it’s their style to use either inexperienced directors or directors who haven’t had a commercial hit in a while. And Benton is a perfect example of someone who functions within a studio system. He works deliberately and years can pass without anything being heard from him. He doesn’t have the track record or power to get whatever he wants made. He’s at the mercy of studio executives. So once again he’s playing the part he’s used to, an assignment director. Disney obviously thought he could deliver the goods. He’s not untalented or a sellout, and he’s turned out some competent commercial work as a screenwriter (Superman) and director (Places in the Heart, his most personal film).
Disney and its film divisions (Touchstone, Buena Vista) have dominated gross receipts at the box office for the last seven years, producing a series of inexpensive comedies and dramas that are artistically negligible though relatively risk free. It’s the closest thing we have to the 40s studio system–a company that has final authority over the cast, script, crew, budget, editing, final cut, and marketing. Its biggest problem is that its formulas no longer work (e.g. The Marrying Man, The Doctor, V.I. Warshawski, and the impersonal, dreadful works that preceded them). This year Disney will post a 20 percent drop in earnings.
Benton’s film also refuses to deal with the darker implications of Billy’s story. And what the filmmakers freely chose to delete–or what Disney executives forced them to–in no way improves on the book. Disney bought the property because it’s the sort of literary work that commands respect, and the movie has the studio’s stamp all over: it neither offends nor provokes.
The movie’s puritanism is clearly the handiwork of its Disney backers. All of the darker elements of the novel–Billy’s emerging sexuality, his mother’s mental instability, his profound fear of Dutch–are strangely absent. Yet Benton doesn’t hold back when it comes to the cruelties people suffer at Dutch’s hands–a fire inspector gets his head crushed, a union functionary is shot in the mouth.
Dustin Hoffman is less mannered than usual, and he gets Dutch’s physical characteristics down, especially what Doctorow called the “resonant rasp” of his voice. But the character isn’t sustained; he atrophies in front of us. Worse, Hoffman and Kidman never connect in a way that gives the film any emotional intensity. Hoffman seems soulless and uninspired, a gaping hole at the film’s core.
